Timeline for How to visualize two bar charts with very different scales without looking redundant
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
4 events
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| Jul 15, 2012 at 16:58 | comment | added | gung - Reinstate Monica | In econ eg, time-series plots with 2 dif axes are commonly used, and people don't make the erroneous assumptions Few warns against, so they don't need to be "suppressed". OTOH, bar charts are commonly used to display group-level statistics, eg means, rather than simple magnitudes like here. Thus, bars could be misleading in some situations. Furthermore, Cleveland has shown that horizontal distances are more accurately read than vertical & dotplots more than bar charts. Thus, this might be a better strategy, but it might not. | |
| Jul 15, 2012 at 16:58 | comment | added | gung - Reinstate Monica | There are good points here, but I don't necessarily agree. I think the best approach is going to depend on various factors. Few's article is interesting (thanks for the link, btw) but it's worth noting his point is people might be confused. Moreover, his advice is for the presentation of business data to people from a wide variety of backgrounds. Yes, it is crucially important that graphs quickly & clearly communicate the important information & not mislead. But, which strategy does this can depend on the audience. | |
| Jul 15, 2012 at 16:07 | comment | added | jthetzel | +1 In my opinion, this is the most elegant approach if OP simply intends to efficiently show the weight and speed. If OP actually intends to visualize a dependency between weight and speed, a scatterplot would be preferred, as @gung describes. I also agree with xan that including two axes on a single plot often confuses interpretation and should usually be avoided. | |
| Jul 15, 2012 at 14:32 | history | answered | xan | CC BY-SA 3.0 |